Speaker 1: The Thinking Atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through.
Speaker 1: The rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If
I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth,
not because.
Speaker 2: I put my hand on a book and made a.
Speaker 1: Wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness. Truth,
Fusian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: I had a choice to make today that we can
do another of authoritarianism, the assault on the constitution, Christian
Nationalism Project twenty twenty five, the lawlessness and the grift
and the sociopathy, and you know, I just thought I
need a break. I've been talking to some friends of
mine about how to cope and those of us, and
I think you may be included. Those of us who
are activated and concerned about all of this. We have
a hard time disconnecting from it, and so it's a
fire hose to the face every single day, and it
just wears you down. You become exhausted in your heart
and your mind and your body, and self care I
think is hard for people like us. Every day we
doom scroll the worst of the worst of the worst,
and it takes a toll. And I think we are
no good to anybody else if we are not caring
for ourselves. I think it's the classic caregivers conundrum. You know,
we often are so busy focused on the outside that
we neglect the interior. And I've tried to make a
point to not doom scroll as much, not lock my
eyes onto the headlines and see the worst of the
worst and fall for every click baity thing. But I'm
going to take some time and I am going to
stop away and I am going to do self care,
and I encourage you to do the same self care.
And this means sometimes fiviolity inconsequential stuff, the good stuff.
And that's what this week is going to be. We're
going to learn things because hey, we're scientists, right, everybody
can do science. We're going to expand our knowledge base
and a general knowledge show and I do these from
time time, So consider this good medicine. You're going to
learn stuff, You're going to have some fun, and you
might have some conversation pieces as you engage in discussion
and discourse out there in your own life. Okay, we're
going to talk about cap uccino and other coffee terms.
Where those terms come from? Why does our body sometimes
feel like it's falling when we're going to sleep and
then we jerk away flopping around on the mattress like
a fish? Why does that happen? What's going on in
the brain? There is a term for it and potential reason.
Speaking of fish, why do we call misdirection in a
story a red herring? We know it's misdirection, But where
did the fish correlation come from? I'm going to get
into that. Why does our skin itch? What causes an itch?
Why do we call daytime cereals soap op bris? I've
never questioned it. I just thought, oh, it's the daytime soaps.
Why isn't a soap opera today? You are going to
know the answer to this deep and probing question. Why
do and I guess this is much more common in
the UK and elsewhere. When people say goodbye, they don't
say goodbye, they say cheerio. Natalie and I hooked on
a British television show. It's on Prime it's called the
Yorkshire ve and it focuses on a veterinary practice. Actually,
there are three of them in close proximity in the
lovely countryside of Yorkshire and people just bring their animals
into these lovely veterinarians and usually the animals get fixed.
I mean, we watch this show. We're in season twelve.
I think they're up to four fourteen seasons. When we
hit the last episode and we're caught up, there will
be grieving in this house. What are we gonna watch
until season fifteen is released? We will grieve because it's
good medicine. We're sitting back, we're propped up in bed,
the dog's in our lap. Maybe I'm munching on some popcorn,
and Natalie's got whatever. And oh look, somebody needs to
pull a tooth on an alpaca. A cat has an
infected eye and can only see out of one side
of its little head. That's terrible. Can his eye sight
be restored? There's a horse with the wonky foot, a
cow that is lame. Somebody's got a chicken that ate
too much corn feed and it's all jammed down in
its body. So they gotta go. They gotta go and
fix the chicken. I don't know how. I'm trying to remember.
Did they open up the chicken. I think they opened
the chicken's body. They anesthetize it and then they literally
just yank all this stuff out of the chicken. Puppies
last night there were puppies born. Somebody brought in this
precious little frenchy. A French bulldog couldn't deliver naturally, so
the dog goes in for a cisarian and doctor Julian
slices the dog open and outcome the cutest let all
boppies you have ever said. Seven puppies and they're making
that puppy sound that the lead, you know. They're whining
and their little tongues are sticking on. Their eyes are closed,
and I just want to hug them and squeeze them
and take them all home and adopt them. This is
what my heart needs the Yorkshire vet. And I'm just
making that recommendation for free. But anyway, time and again,
whenever the patient is leaving the vets or whoever, say
cheerio and that means goodbye, have a good day. But
where does cheerio come from? So much that you and
I are going to learn the today. So let the
entering and fun and lighthearted science begin. First off, I
want to talk about a term that we use often.
We talk about people being in the lime lights, meaning
that they are the focus of public attention. Right, Well,
they were in the lime lights during this occasion or
over this event or whatever. The lime light. Why do
we call it that? Well, let's find out. In eighteen sixteen,
the British government was trying to survey Ireland for reference.
Those surveyors were using the tall mountains as points of reference,
but there was a problem. Bad weather was common, lots
of rain, lots of clouds, and this reduced visibility. Sometimes
the surveyors couldn't see the mountains. Well. It was around
this time that an English inventor, a guy named gold
Worthy Gurney, developed a new and unique kind of lamp.
It was a blowpipe that burned oxygen and hydrogen to
create a small but extremely hot flame, and when he
directed that flame toward calcium oxide, it made a very
bright light. Calcium oxide was known as quick lime. Now,
the science and the chemistry behind all of this is
pretty thick, but in very basic terms, quick lime has
a very high melting point, which meant that the atoms
would vibrate rapidly, but they would not disintegrate, so you
could burn that light for long periods of time without
the quick lime melting away. And it was an engineer,
a guy named Thomas Drummond, who was the first person
to make serious practical use of this new technology and
those dark and often stormy mountains of Ireland. He and
his survey crews would place these lime lights on the
tops of mountains visible from as far as sixty eight
miles away. The surveyors again had their reference points for
the mapping of Ireland, those lime lights showing the distances
with their white, hot flames. In eighteen thirty seven, theaters
started using lime lights to illuminate their auditoriums. The gas
lights that they had previously been using were not very bright.
It was hard for actors and audiences to really see
what was going on. The gas lights were also major
fire hazards, but lime lights, with those little blow pipes
and quick lime cylinders at the ends, they were a
much better alternative. Traditionally, there would be one limelight for
the main stage and other limelights scattered throughout the seating area,
depending on the size and shape of the auditorium. Now
there were downsides to the limelight. The little block inside
each of these lights had to be constantly adjusted, so
a monitor would have to be there tweaking it. And
of course there was still an open flame that was
very hot and deadly. Fires were still a danger, But
the limelight was a much better alternative than the gas light,
and it was used frequently for decades until a guy
named Thomas Edison came along. Edison's first practical light bulb,
produced in eighteen seventy nine, effectively snuffed out the lime
lights in favor of electric illumination. Still, our references to
these little flames continue in modern day language. If somebody
is the center of attention, they are in the lime lights,
and in that way, those tiny calcium oxide and white
hot flames continue to burn today. Here in the United States,
we often smile when we hear our British friends say
goodbye using the word cheerio. Something about cheerio just sounds
so friendly, old fashioned in the best sense of the term.
And I wish this was a word I could get
away with. You know, I'm an Oklahoma boy here in
the States, and get away with goodbye bye, see you later.
Take it easy or whatever. But if I was to
try cheerio, people would just stare at me like I'd
grown a second head, right, But the British they can
totally get away with it. What does cheerio mean? Well,
for the answer to this question, we go back to
the twelve hundreds and an Anglo French word cheer chre
that was used to describe the countenance of the face,
in other words, the expression of emotion your look. Cheer
itself was derived from a late Latin word kara cra
Kara means face, so cheer would refer to your frame
of mind, your feeling, or your mood as expressed on
the face. By the late fourteenth century, the meaning had
expanded to mean a bit more. The quote state or
temper of mind as indicated by expression. This could be positive,
it could be negative. If you were in a bad way,
you had a dreary cheer, and if you were happy,
of course, you were a person of good cheer. Seventeen
twenty we saw the first reference to cheer as something
called a shout of encouragement, possibly used as a nautical
gesture between sailors on the ocean. The greeting. What cheer
made its way across the oceans, as Puritans used the
term in southern New England. It was picked up by
the Algonquin Indians and spread outward as far as Canada.
By the early twentieth century, cheer had evolved with a
little more flair, first noticed in eighteen ninety six as
cheer oh, and then in nineteen eighteen as cheerio. Cheers
my friend's encouragement to you, may you have a good
frame of mind and a good day, a good life
all around it. And of course a version of the
original cheer can also be heard when we lift our
glasses in salute, we toast someone, we say cheers. And
on another related note, there's that famous breakfast cereal, which
debuted back in nineteen forty one as cheery Oats Oats
Cheery Oats, which four years later was shortened to just
be cheerios. Most coffee lovers enjoy a good cappuccino, but
have we ever stopped to ask what a cappuccino really
is beyond the espresso, the steamed milk, and the foam.
We hear cappuccino and we think italy rite the Italian word,
but The drink itself actually originated in Vienna, Austria. Back
in eighteen oh five, there was a coffee house located
in Vienna, and it first listed on its menu a
coffee with milk and cream. People tried it, they enjoyed it.
Other shops in the area started serving something similar, doing
their own rifts on it, adding various flavors and spices,
and the drink spread out of Austrian borders. Of course,
it went into Italy, where it was given the name capuccino.
Why did they call it a cappuccino. The drink was
actually named for its color, the same color as the
robes of Capuchin monks. The Capuchins were a sixteenth century
order in central Italy. They were reformed Franciscans. These monks
emphasized the simple life, a life of prayer and quiet templation.
And yes, they wore those types of robes that you
and I envision when somebody says, monk that milk chocolate
color of brown. There was a cord with three knots,
which represented their three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
The cord tied the hood of the robe, and the
hood was called a cappuccino. The invention of espresso machines
in the early nineteen hundreds caused cappuccinos, the drinks, not
the robes, to become known and loved far beyond Austria
and Italy all around the world. But now, when you
sip your hot, delicious espresso frothed with fluffy milk, and
you see that distinct milky brown color in your cup,
you will see echoes of the old capuchin monks, the
men humbly contemplating all things in thinking brains covered in
those capuccino hoods. By the way, American soldiers that were
stationed in Italy during the Second World War often wanted
a coffee, but they weren't always fans of the Italian espresso.
They said it was just too strong for American taste buds.
They wanted something less intense, more like the drip coffee
they enjoyed back in the United States. And so local
baristas in Italy started adding more and more and more
hot water to the heavy espresso, maybe tossing in some
milk and sugar if desired, and then they would serve
them to American troops, and that drink became known as
the Cafe Americano, which is why our Starbucks men use
and almost all coffee menus offer Americano coffee today. And
one last coffee note, this one about the machiato. An
espresso machiato is made with one shot of espresso diluted
with one to two teaspoons of steamed milk. A latte
machiato has maybe a half shot of espresso with steamed
milk and a taller glass. It is a sweeter drink.
It's more layered. The small amount of milk is supposed
to add a little bit of sweetness to it, but
it's not enough to knock the punch out of the espresso.
Some people say the machiato is just too bitter. Others
say they just prefer the stronger, straight espresso. But the name,
the Italian word machiato translates marked or stained. The added
milk and sugar leaves a mark or a stain on
the espresso. And because machiato means marked or stained, the
espresso has been marked or stained. It is a machiato.
Can you feel the pressure inside your skull as the
brain expands? We are evolving? Oh yeah, I can feel it,
and we're just getting started. More to come next. I'm
going to be speaking for the Friday night banquets at
the upcoming American Atheist National Convention. That's Easter weekend in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Big events on the way as well, Calgary, Alberta, Seattle, Washington, Wichita, Kansas, Nashville, Tennessee, Sarnia, Ontario,
and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Not speaking at all these,
but they're just great conventions and free thought gatherings that
you won't want to miss if you're in the area.
Details at the Thinkingatheist dot com slash events. Okay, right
now we're back to some general knowledge learning stuff about
random stuff. Joe Woodland was sitting on Miami Beach and
he was thinking about dots and dashes. That's just how
Joe was wired. He was an analytical guy. He had
learned Morse code in the Boy Scouts many years before,
and so there he was sitting in contemplation on the beach,
poking his fingers into the sand. He was writing things
in Morse code. Now, there may be a lot of
younger folks who have heard the term Morse code, but
they have no idea what I'm talking about. Morse code
is a communications method which uses dots and dashes, known
officially as dits and does international Morse code translates the
twenty six basic Latin letters A dizy into these little
characters of dots and dashes of various combinations and lengths.
And you can use Morse code with sound or flashes
of light. In fact, here is the sound of audio
morse code spelling out the word hello. Now for obvious reasons,
Morse code takes a lot of time to use, but
it was used. And Joe was there on the beach
and he was poking his dots and dashes in the sand,
and he had his fingers submerged in the sand, when
for some reason, he pulled his fingers toward him and
he looked down at the pattern he had created, and
he saw that he had four lines. And he realized
that these could be wide lines or narrow lines, since
that of just dots and dashes. And then he took
those same four fingers, still in the sand, and he
swept them around into a circle. And he thought, hmm,
this is a new kind of language. And Joe had
been looking to create a new language, and I am
guessing you are already ahead of me. Joe Woodland had
graduated from Drexel Institute of Technology with a degree in
mechanical engineering in nineteen forty eight. The head of a
local grocery store chain came to Drexel in the hopes
of developing a new way to read product data during
checkouts of the school said Nah, I'm not interested. But
Joe Woodland and his classmate Bernard Silver were interested, and
they seized the opportunity. And it was Joe's gliding fingers
in that sand that became ground zero for a new
kind of product identifier, his original version shaped in the
form of a bullseye. On October seventh, nineteen fifty two,
the two engineers received a patent for their invention with
a catchy name. It was called Classifying Apparatus and Method,
and it would find its first use in a grocery
store in Ohio in nineteen sixty six. Joe Woodland went
to work for IBM in nineteen fifty two. We stayed
until he retired in nineteen eighty seven, and he further
developed his system with laser scanning to technology and computer
micro processors as they were becoming more popular. In nineteen seventy,
product makers standardized ID codes for common grocery items, and
Joe would go on to receive the National Metal of
Technology and Innovation in nineteen ninety two, inducted with his
partner into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in twenty
eleven for bringing us those bars, the bars which were
his riff on Morse code the bar code. That first
grocery store, the one that first scanned a bar code,
was located in the small town of Troy, Ohio. This
is where the checkout equipment manufacturer National Cash Register was located.
NCR invented all kinds of cash register innovations like weighing
and pricing machines, and it introduced that first barcode friendly
register and it scanned its first item just after eight
in the morning on June twenty sixth, nineteen seventy four.
The item was a pack of Wrigley's chewing gum. The
first major company to integrate the UPC or universal product
code was Kmart. The technology exploded in the nineteen eighties
and the instant retail ID that was the barcode changed everything. Today,
they are used by about ninety percent of the top
five hundred companies in the United States, all because a
man who was once a boy scout made dots and
dashes in the sand in that moment, from a single Troy,
Miami grocery chain to the cash registers of the entire world.
Woodland literally cracked the code. Here's something I've wondered. It's
not a big deal, but it's just a short one
I thought you might be interested in. On aircraft carriers,
the runways aren't straight, like the ship isn't like here
to there, and the runway just goes linear. It's always
kind of cock eyed. Why are runways angled on aircraft carriers? Well,
this alteration came about because of the jet plane. Previously,
with propeller aircraft landing on carriers, straight runways were easier
because the planes were much lighter and they were a
lot slower. So even if the plane was trying to
hook onto those arresting wires to stop and missed, there
were barricades that could stop a prop plane that overshot
the mark. It wasn't that big a deal. But then
came the heavier, faster jets. This became a problem. So
carriers were soon built with the runway's angled by about
ten degrees for landing. This resulted in fewer landing accidents
that meant less risk to pilots, fewer repairs, the saving
of lives and money. The angled runway also freed up
a section on deck for parked or staged planes, and
some carriers were big enough to be able to accommodate
multiple launching catapults with separate launch decks, which meant more
planes in the air in less time. And then if
somebody bombed part of the deck of the ship, they
wouldn't necessarily knock out all of its launching capacity. So
that is the story of the angled deck on aircraft carriers,
result of heavy jets, the desire for more planes and
better efficiency on deck. Have you ever been lying in
bed and you're drifting off to sleep. It's bliss right.
The lights are off, you're snuggled, you're hibernating. You know,
you've got the big comforter, and you're just there. Maybe
you've got a fan on or something, and you're just
almost there. You're almost asleep. You've fallen asleep, but just barely.
And then suddenly you have the feeling that you are
falling out of the sky and you jolt awake on
the mattress. Maybe you flop around a little bit. I do,
and Natalie. Natalie is always like, what the hell, I'm
just laying there. I was falling. I was falling in
my sleep. This happens to a lot of people. I'll
bet it's happen to you. What is going on? Well,
there's a name for this. It is called the hypnic jerk. Now,
the hypnic jerk, also known as a sleep start, remains
a bit of a mystery. There's a lot of speculation,
but science has not yet determined outright what causes this.
It is suspected that when you and I are falling asleep,
something is misfiring in the reticular brain stem. This activates
a startle response when there's nothing actually there to startle
this there's like a short circuit. It is also possible
that we are having some kind of reaction to dream
like imagery. Maybe we've already started to dream and something
kind of rattles our cage or surprises us, and so
we react physically. Because the body is not yet inert
when you and I are dreaming, of course, the brain
paralyzes the body so that you know we're running in
our dream, we're not actually running around the house, right.
The brain actually makes the body not move. This is
a good thing, but if we haven't quite fallen totally asleep,
then we might see a little bit of a flash
of an image or a dream and the body will
react even more. Certain factors make the hipnick jerk more
likely to happen. Too much caffeine or other stimulants in
the body. Nicotine is another substance that kind of wakes
up the brain even when the rest of our body
is tired. Exercise is really good for us, and it
often helps to improve sleep. But if you exercise really
close to bedtime, it's possible that your brain is still
really activated and super alert even when you close your
eyes and turn off the lights. Of course, this is
not a surprise. Stress and anxiety, chronic insomnia, sleep deprivation,
this can be a big factor. It can also affect
our mood and our focus. All of this stuff combines
to make us a little bit more agitated. When we
finish the day, we are more likely to have some
kind of a brain misfire which shocks us physically. The
hypnic jerk is commonly experienced in much the same way.
The feeling of falling sometimes hallucinations, a flashing light, a
blinding light, the sounds of banging or snapping. When you
jolt to consciousness, it's almost like somebody pounded on the
wall or the bedpost. But the hypnic jerk is usually harmless.
So the next time you feel like you are falling
and then you land hard on the mattress stone, worry,
You're not broken. You are just hip nick lee jerking.
And the upside is that you can just tell your
formerly sleeping partner that it was involuntary and not your fault.
I was getting a haircut last week, and I'm sitting
in the barber chair is it a barber, stylist, technician,
whatever you call them, and you know, they put that
bib on you. They tie it around the neck and
then you've got the big sort of body tarp to
keep the hair from falling all over your clothing. And
I'm sitting there with my hands under this bib and
I suddenly got an itch on the end of my nose,
and I don't know why, but I did not want
to reach up and scratch it. She wasn't going to
cut my finger off with the scissors. But for some reason,
I was really shy about it. I'm sitting there totally still.
The itch is getting worse and worse and worse, until
finally I could not take it. I'm like, hang on,
I've got an itch, and so I yank my hand
out and scratched the end of my nose. Sweet relief.
But what caused the end of my nose to itch
like that? Well, according to the Mayo Clinic, there is
a name for itchy skin. It is prroritis, which is
hard to say. So I'm just gonna stick with itchy skin.
The itch itself is often caused when our skin gets dry,
and dry skin gets worse as we age. The skin
sometimes cracks, these tiny little microscopic cracks, and then it
gets irritated. Nerves will respond to this with something that
isn't pain, but it's discomfort, like a precursor to pain
and irritant. Other causes for the skin itch might be
the condition exima. This is a pretty serious thing, and
a lot of people dry cracked irritated skin chronically. Maybe
you brushed up against an allergen or an irritant, sometimes
resulting in a reaction like a rash, psoriasis, is a
condition that causes flaky patches and even scales to develop
on the skin, and that can kind of rub and
irritate Inflamed hair follicles might be the culprit dandriff, that
dead skin that kind of hangs out on the scalp,
or the hair parasites like head lice, those can be
really itchy. A viral infection like chicken pox or athlete's foot,
overactive thyroid might be to blame, or maybe some other
internal condition that causes itching sensations. Hormonal changes might trigger it,
or even psychological conditions like depression could make someone feel
skin discomfort. There are so many complex possibilities. The National
Institute of Health has some recommendations for chronic itchers. Instead
of scratching the itch and potentially aggravating the problem, just
pat it or tap it with your fingers. I've tried this.
That's just crap. There's nothing like a good scratch. I've
also heard scratch around it, not scratched, they at scratch
around it. I've never had success with that. Also from
the NIH, put a damp towel against the area, use
unperfumed moisturizer, whar loose cotton clothing or something that is
non abrasive fabric, and of course check that laundry detergent
to make sure there is not some chemical in there
that is making your skin all angry. Here's an origin
of an everyday thing that I thought you might enjoy.
Nineteen ninety one, the University of Cambridge, England, two innovative
men invented something so unique, so novel, so groundbreaking, so
useful that you and I would see around eight billion
versions of their invention in use all around the world today,
the webcam. These two researchers worked in a seven story
computer lab at Cambridge and they were trying to make
a locally networked surveillance camera that would broadcast video from
one location to computer monitors throughout the entire building. Now
this seems so quaint today, so easy to do. Modern
webcams are built into our entire lives, our home and
office computers, even our cell phones. And they're amazing technology.
Full color, four K resolution, enhancements to take out the
background or ad decorations, all kinds of bells and whistles.
But this was way back in nineteen ninety one, the
time when radio stations were playing both grunge bands and
color me bad Converse was the popular tennis shoe. The
Soviet Union was dissolving the big computers at that time,
the Apple II, the Commodore sixty four, the Radio Shack
TRS eighty standard IBM office computers PCs often ran on
Windows three point zero, the installation of which required seven
separate discs that would be loaded one after the other
into a drive. Installation could take hours, and the National
Science Foundation had just opened the Internet for commercial use,
introducing the World Wide Web and eventually connecting billions of
US in real time. Nineteen ninety one. This was the
time of the Intel four eighty six microprocessor, where a
twenty five megahertz processor speed and four meg of memory
were revolutionary. Now compare that twenty five megahertz then to
four gigahertz today, four meg of memory then to perhaps
thirty two gig of ram today. It's funny. Computer culture
a quarter century ago was both the time of Enlightenment
and the Dark Ages. And something like a networked camera
sending a single video feed to a building of computer users.
Nothing like that had ever been done before, but these researchers,
Quentin's Stafford Fraser and Paul Jardetski at the University of
Cambridge set themselves to make a webcam so they could
give their fellow researchers the ability to surveil the happenings
at point A, streaming to their individual monitors at points BCD, etc.
Quentin wrote the software using the X window system protocol.
Paul wrote the server program. The camera feed was a
staggering one hundred and twenty nine gray scale pixels and
it wasn't actually video. This camera would only be able
to snap three photos a minute to send up the chain.
And remember this was two years before web browsers could
even display images, So Fraser and Jardetski had to write
a specific program just to allow visuals to stream to
everybody's computer. But they did it. They built it, they
programmed it, they activated it. They connected researchers at academics
in a seven story Cambridge computer lab to a three
frame a minute webcam feed that these people would obsess over.
They would obsess over it, and not just because of
the ground breaking technology you see computer innovation, code writing,
et cetera. These things require lots of hours behind a computer,
hard work requiring a focused brain, brains which crave stimulation.
But people were tired of walking the whole building to
one specific break room only to find that the coffee
pot was empty. That's right. The first webcam was built
so that a building full of Cambridge researchers could see
if there was any coffee made before they got up
and walked all the way down to fill their mugs.
Programmer Quentin Stafford Fraser actually called his custom program ex
Coffee and it saved thousands and thousands and thousands of
needless steps down halls and stairways. It also let everybody
know when someone needed to make fresh coffee. The ex
Coffee camera has become part of technology history. It actually
has its own wiki page. It is listed on computer
history chronologies. And when that laboratory was moved in two
thousand and one, the primitive little webcam, the first webcam,
was finally switched off for the very last time. The
story of that turning off was covered in The Times,
the Washington Post and elsewhere. The last of that series
of coffee machines in that breakroom monitored by webcam. The
last one was eventually sold to a German news website
via eBay. It was restored and switched on in the
magazine's editorial office, and that coffee maker now sits in
the hinz Nixdorf Museum. Oh what a marriage coffee and
the ability to see remotely whether or not the coffee
is made. That love of the sacred java provided the
launch point for the webcam we used today in zoom meetings, webcasts,
FaceTime with family and friends, all of that from coffeecam.
The late author and humorist Terry Pratchett once said, coffee
is a way of stealing time that should buy rights
belong to your older self. Thirty five years ago to
Cambridge programmer's bought time for seven floors of coffee drinkers.
How could they know back then that their coffee cam
would change the world. Next up, let's get serious about
the soap opera. Why don't we call them a soap opera?
I'm going to tell you next. I am so thankful
for you for listening, for supporting the show, spreading the word,
and for being a patron. And if you aren't a patron,
I would so welcome a patronage from you. You can
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in your general direction. Continuing our broadcast today, just some fun,
general knowledge and a break from the crazy world daytime television.
What are we talking about there, right? Game shows, talk
shows and soap operas? Right, Well, we understand the words
game and talk But why our daytime drama is called soaps.
To find the answer to this deep and probing question,
we again go back in time, this time to the
early twentieth century, to the era when radio was king.
In fact, the first program that was ever called a
soap opera aired before the age of television. It was
a show called Painted Dreams, a radio show which debuted
on the twentieth of October nineteen thirty on wg INN
in Chicago, and this radio drama aired every weekday in
a fifteen minute time slot. The target audience was housewives.
The storytory line of Painted Dreams involved in American widow,
a woman named Mother Moynahan and her unmarried daughter. Other
radio soaps to follow included shows with titles like the
Affairs of Doctor Gentry Against the Storm and Amanda of
Honeymoon Hill. The first daytime TV soap in the US
first aired back in nineteen forty nine. It was called
These Are My Children, kicking off a whole genre of
daytime TV serials designed to draw viewers into the lives
and loves and loyalties and betrayals, the scandals, the deaths,
even the resurrections of familiar characters. Soap operas, of course,
are shot cheaply, they're shot fast, and they usually happen
in common indoor sets. Serials are about quantum, not necessarily quality,
but they remain popular all of these decades later. Today,
the most watched soap opera in the United States is
The Young and the Restless, which of course features beautiful
people who are very young and very restless. Okay, fine,
but why do we call them soap operas? Well? The
early radio and television shows were often funded, not with
various commercial breaks and a whole bunch of different advertisers.
Shows were funded with one single sponsor, and a bunch
of those daytime serials were sponsored by soap makers. As
The World Turns is brought to you today by Colgate
Paul Malive, right, that was the whole show. One sponsor.
Guiding Light is brought to you today by pro in gambles,
oxidol and ivory soaps. And it was the promotion of
bath lathers and household cleaners advertised to a female audience
in the mid twentieth century of housewives and homemakers that
caused daytime serial shows to be known as the soap operas.
They were dramas funded by detergents. Okay, you're watching or
you're reading a story or listening to a story. It's
some kind of a maybe a murder mystery. Okay, it's
a yarn, a complicated puzzle where the pieces are not
all put together, and the story uses something or someone
that will mislead or distract you from the real cause
or culprit. Oh, sure was actually Colonel Mustard with the
revolver in the library, but the clues had made it
look like the killer was Miss Scarlet with the dagger
in the study. Indicators pointed to Miss Scarlet, she wasn't
the one. She was a red herring. Well, why do
we call this kind of thing a red herring? To
find out, we have to travel back to the year
eighteen oh seven, talking about an English politician and writer,
a guy named William Cobbitt, and he wrote a fictional
story that criticized the media, as the press was totally
fixated on the defeat of Napoleon. It was all they
talked about, Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon prematurely saying that he has
been defeated over and over again, ignoring everything else that
was going on. He was irritated, and so he wrote
a fictional story that sort of served as an analogy
for this kind of distraction. His story was the tale
of a boy who was trying to throw hunting dogs
off the scent of a rabbit that the dogs were
chasing it. So the boy grabbed a stinky fish, which
was a red herring, and he dragged it on the
ground and he rubbed it on the trees and all
that stuff to distract the dogs. And so the subtext
there was that journalists had been distracted by the stinky
fish and they had taken a wrong turn toward Napoleon
when they should have been talking about other more important
domestic issues. A herring is a silver colored fish. It
is most abundant in coastal waters off of the North
Pacific and North Atlantic. When you cook a herring on
a smoker, it changes color from silver to a brownish red.
Long before the the invention of refrigeration, the process of
smoking meat was one of the ways they would preserve it,
sometimes for months. Effective but also really really smelly, and
the silverfish turned red. Legend said that using the herring
had lots of applications. You could drag the fish on
the ground to train hounds to hunt prey. You could
acclimate horses to intense smells out on the prairie so
they wouldn't get spooked when they were on fox hunts.
Escaped prisoners might cover their tracks with fish smells that
would confuse the dogs. But it was the idiom that
was started by William Cobbitts way back in eighteen oh
seven that became the red herring reference we used today.
The red herring defined as quote a detail or remark
inserted into a discussion, either intense or unintentionally, that side
tracks the discussion. So if you hear something that sounds
like misdirection and your brain suspects an inappropriate detour, you
might have just sniffed out a red herring. We humans
have long wondered what happens when our dogs stare at us,
or tilt their heads or bark and wine, even dream.
Sometimes we can into it what our fairy friends want
or need. It's time for dinner, they want a snack,
or a walk, a car ride. Maybe they are communicating
discomfort that needs medical care. But do our dogs love
us the way we think they love us? Or do
they really of what we do for them, especially when
it comes to food. Well this became a question for science,
and in twenty seventeen, doctor Gregory Burns, a neuroscientist at
Emery University in Atlanta, decided to find out. His experiment
would include dogs, treats, lovely words, and an MRI machine. Now,
if you are picturing a dog tied to a bed
while one hundred and thirty decibels of vibrating magnetic coils
blast into their sensitive ears, relax. The whole process was
safe and comfortable and pretty ingenious. Doctor Burns got the
idea at the strangest time. It was just after the
Navy seals had dropped out of their helicopters and had
killed Osama bin Laden. Part of that sealed team was
a canine, a dog named Cairo. Cairo had leapt out
of the chopper alongside his humans, and Doctor Burns thought
to himself, man, those choppers are incredibly loud. If they
can train a dog to ride a helicopter, maybe I
could train a dog to sit inside an MRI machine
for what goal? Because doctor Burns was hoping to literally
read a dog's mind. MRI scans have long been used
to detect activity in human brains. We can see emotional
processes firing up based on various stimuli. Of course, humans
go through the machine with ear protection and using wraps
and gauze and fabric and other things. Ear protection would
be provided for any dog put inside the machine. Doctor
Burns built an MRI simulator in his own basement. He
purposefully made it noisy. It was shaped like the real thing,
with the big disc and then the bed that slides
inside of it. His family terrier CALLI, was slowly acclimated
to it. Those practice sessions went on for three months,
and then doctor Burns did a kind of casting call
for volunteers or I guess more accurately dog owners who
were volunteering their own pets, but many were appropriate for
the experiment. They did very well with the conditions, and
so the tests began. No drugs were ever used on
these dogs. They were never tied down. They could get
up and walk away at any moment. These tests were
humanely done by responsible dog lovers. One of the big
questions for the scanner was do dogs love us more
than they love food? Or do they fake love because
they want food? Or maybe we just come in second
in the love hierarchy. To answer the question, dogs were
placed in an MRI machine. They were resting comfortably relaxed,
their ears bound and protected, and researchers would alternate two
different things, either food or praise. The food was a
doggy favorite, hot dogs. The praise was what you might expect,
probably what most of us do with our own dogs
at home. You know what, a good puppy, sweet little baby,
You're doing so good. Who's the best boy, Who's the
best girl? Daddy loves you so much? That kind of thing.
By the way, in my humble opinion, this is the
only way to speak to dogs. Anyone who does not
babble like an idiot is probably a sociopath who should
be avoided at all costs. But I digress. Back to
the experiment, Doctor Burns and his team discovered some fascinating
stuff like dogs have dedicated parts of their brains just
for recognizing faces. Faces are a critical part of how
dogs interact with the world. Scientists also discovered that certain
dog brains are more prone to fear and anxiety from birth.
This makes them much more sensitive, much more appropriate to
calmer environments, and a bad choice for chaotic ones, certainly
not appropriate as service dogs. That information might help us
better rehabilitate shelter dogs who have been traumatized by abandonment
than abuse. But if you are still waiting to find
out if Daisy the snuggling golden Doodle really means it,
you will be pleased to know that the majority of
dogs responded to food and praise equally, almost straight down
the middle. Pleasure was pleasure, Goodness was goodness, and flavor
on the tongue was on par with sweet words to
the ears. In fact, and I know you'll be glad
to hear this. Of the small percentage of canines that
warn't fifty to fifty, those dogs preferred you and me
love language, sweet words spoken in a sweet cadence to
our sweet little furry babies. They preferred us over those
meaty treats. Doesn't that feel good? Now, go hug your dog,
or your cat or alpaca, you know, your hand, amster,
your chicken, whatever, Go hug your whoever it is or
whatever it is. Go and get some self care time.
I hope today has been kind of a nice reprieve,
but I'm serious, take some time prioritize you and your
mental health. You're not going to fix the world in
a day, and neither am I. We got to take
a little time, decompress and get ready for the next
day and the next fights ahead. Okay, it's been so
much fun today. Thank you for listening. Take care, I'll
see you later.
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